
PR29514 Lee, ^ir Sidney 
iQLkh Shakespeare and the Italian 

Renaissance 




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THE LIBRARY 

OF 

THE UNIVERSITY 

OF CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 



Ex Libris 
C. K. OGDEN 



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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

1915 



Shakespeare and the Italian 

Renaissance 

By 

Sir Sidney Lee, D.Litt. 

Fellow of the Academy 



New York 

Oxford University Press American Branch 

35 West 32nd Street 

London: Humphrey Milford 



THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

1915 



Shakespeare and the Italian 

Renaissance 

By 
Sir Sidney Lee, D.Litt. 

Fellow of the Academy 



New York 

Oxford University Press American Branch 

35 West 32nd Street 

London : Humphrey Milford 



Copyright in the United States of America 

by the Oxford University Press 

American Branch 

1915 



ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN 

RENAISSANCE 

By Sir SIDNEY LEE, D.Litt. 

FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 

OUTLINE OF THE THEME 

I. Italy's contribution to modern civilization. — The classical heri- 
tage. — The innovations of the Italian Renaissance.— The study of Plato 
and the Neo-Platonists. — The faith in physical beauty. — The new sense 
of colour. — The plea for intellectual enfranchisement. — The new scien- 
tific curiosity. — The federal bonds of European literature. 

II. The significance of humanism. — Elizabethan debt to Italian 
stimulus. — Tudor travel in Italy. — Sir Philip Sidney in Venice. — 
Italian visitors to England. — Giordano Bruno in London and Oxford. — 
The study of Italian poetry and prose by Shakespeare's contemporaries. 
— Italian influence on Bacon's scientific speculation. 

> III. Shakespeare's humanism. — His intellectual receptivity. — His 
freedom from insularity combined with patriotic ardour. — The prob- 
lem of his knowledge of Italian. — The Italian echoes in the moonlight 
scene in The Merchant of Venice. — The slenderness of Shakespeare's 
reference to Italian art. — His dramatic adaptations of Italian novels. — 
,^His Italian scenes and characters. — Romeo and Juliet, Ticelfth Night, 
"■and Othello. — His Sonnets and the Italian conception of Platonism. — 
The traditional fascination of Italy in later English poetry, 

I 

Literature, philosophy, science, law, and art are the five main 
currents of the tide of civilization. All the five trace much of their 
healthful flow in modern times within and without Europe to the 
impetus of Italian example — to the comprehensive energy in the 
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries of Italy's imaginative, 
intellectual, and artistic accomplishment. Modern Italy's political 
history was until the middle of last century a record of gloom, a tale 
of cruel dismemberment ; but her intellectual and artistic fortunes 



4 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

never ran higher than in the days of Shakespeare's youth. Litera- 
ture and art gave a genuine meaning to the conception of Italian 
unity, even when the country was politically torn asunder by the 
strife of faction and by domestic or foreign tyrannies. A degen- 
erate era of Italian culture opened at the close of the sixteenth 
century, but before that date Italy — by virtue of her art, poetry, 
and philosophy — had won unfading laurels for herself, and had 
helped many foreign brows to chaplets no less lasting. To change 
the metaphor, Italy may be fairly likened, in the fourteenth, fif- 
teenth, and especially in the sixteenth century, to a copious foun- 
tain whence the sparkling waters of civilization spread in broad 
streams over modern Europe, and thence at later epochs, over 
a great part of the world. So honourable a tribute can be paid to 
no other country. 

Italy set out on her modern career with advantages which she 
shared with no other part of Europe. Civilization in liberal meas- 
ure illumined the land while mists of barbarism enveloped the rest 
of Europe. 

The intellect of ancient Italy was largely fertilized by forces 
older and more lucent than those of her own breeding: by the 
thought and style of Greece. But the native land of Vergil and 
Catullus, of Cicero and Tacitus, insured herself near 2,000 years 
ago against a denial at any era of her literary genius or power. 
The country which harboured the Republic and Empire of Rome, 
the country which was the nursery of Roman law and the birth- 
place of Latin Christianity, claimed in the fifth century of our 
era a civilized and a civilizing tradition, which Attila and his 
Huns, with other scourges of kindred race, vowed to perdition in 
vain. The successes and failures of the Gothic warlords of the 
fifth century in their assaults on Italy graphically illustrate the 
virtual futility of relying on brute violence to annihilate the fruit 
of man's intellect and spirit. 

The barbarian invaders of Italy effected a very incomplete con- 
quest of the country, very incomplete when it is compared with 
their conquests elsewhere in Western Europe. In spite of the 
invasion and settlement of Teutons in the North, in spite of the 
later immigrations of Normans and Saracens in the South, the 
Latin race can still claim in the peninsula an ethnical predominance. 
On the lips of the people at large the old Latin language suffered 
in course of time transformation, re-formation. Yet the Latin 
tongue in select circles survived without radical decay and came 
to serve the greatest purposes of human intercourse, the purposes 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 5 

of social organization and of education, not in Italy alone, but 
wherever government was built on sure foundations by the bar- 
barian conquerors. The triumph of the Latin language over the 
perils of extinction which menaced it in Europe of the fifth and 
sixth centuries is a complementary testimony to the impotence of 
brute matter in conflict with unconquerable mind. 

Some 1,500 years ago Italy proved herself the saviour of such 
civilization as the world then knew, and during some eleven suc- 
ceeding centuries she discharged the proud function of protecting 
the old elements of civilization and reinforcing it with new elements. 
The missionary activities of civilizing Italy never suffered arrest 
before the close of the sixteenth century. Yet the Teutonic influ- 
ence bred in the Middle Ages sentiments and ideas which clouded 
the mental and spiritual atmosphere of all Europe and cast their 
shadow on Italy. One should not exaggerate the darkness of the 
Dark Ages ; one should not disparage or ignore mediaeval culture. 
Much Latin literature and all Greek literature save Aristotle's 
philosophical works were for the time lost. The Greek language 
fell out of knowledge, and the lapse tended to impoverish the intel- 
lect. On the other hand, a substantial amount of Latin poetry 
and prose was studied, and gave a cue to intellectual exertion. 
Vergil and Ovid never lacked mediaeval readers or commentators. 
Aristotle in a Latin garb was reckoned the prophet of scholastic 
philosophy. In Italy especially clear gleams of light broke the 
mediaeval sky. There was in the thirteenth century the poetry 
of Dante, a brilliant radiance. None the less the teaching of the 
old civilization endured in Italy a partial eclipse. The mediaeval 
Church enshrouded life and learning in a dim, mystical gloom of 
which the ancient world knew little. The mind of man abandoned 
itself to dreams and reveries. 

The mediaeval sentiment may be comprehensively defined as an 
amalgam of dogma and asceticism. The mind and the body were 
alike condemned to unprecedented restraints and austerities. The 
monastic vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity well reflect the 
mediaeval aspiration. The piece of literature which best satisfied 
the general temper had for its title ' the contempt of the world and 
the miseries of the human condition.' Even Dante, who caught 
many Pisgah-like glimpses of later enlightenment, saddened man 
with his pictures of the Inferno, and he made his final goal peace 
or quietism in all spheres of human endeavour. Dante's only hope 
of realizing his ideal lay through universal recognition of a single 
supreme authority, soaring above all calls of nationality as well 



6 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

as individuality, a single supreme authority which should find em- 
bodiment in an omnipotent emperor. 

In the fourteenth century there sprang from Italian soil a move- 
ment which had for its effect, if not for its first aim, the emanci- 
pation of human life and human aspiration from the fetters of 
medijpval conceptions. The movement which we call the Renais- 
sance sprang up and matured on Italian soil, and confirmed Italy's 
old title of saviour or champion of European civilization. 

It was the gradual discovery by Italy of the true range of 
classical Greek literature and philosophy which was the spring of 
the intellectual and spiritual revival. That discovery was begun 
in the fourteenth century, when Greek subjects of the falling 
Byzantine Empire brought across the Adriatic manuscript memo- 
rials of Greek intellectual culture, of which the West had lost 
nearly all knowledge for some 1,000 years. Petrarch and 
Boccaccio, the fathers of modern Italian literature, although they 
were in no true sense Greek scholars, vaguely heralded the new 
Greek revelation. But close study of Greek texts was needed 
to bring home the significance of the new learning. It was not till 
the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire by the Turks in the fif- 
teenth century that the literary art of Athens was driven west- 
ward in full flood, and the scope of Greek enlightenment was defi- 
nitely acknowledged by Italy. It was then there first came into 
the modern world the feeling for form, the frank delight in life, 
the unrestricted employment of the reason. An ancient literature 
and an ancient philosophy had come to light to prove that the 
human intellect possessed capacities which were hitherto unim- 
agined, and to convict of futility the dogmatic and ascetic ideals 
of the jNJiddle Ages. 

Perhaps the Greek author whose influence on the new movement 
was largest was Plato. Some dim knowledge of his theories is 
visible in mediaeval literature ; but Aristotle in a Latin garb was the 
only Greek philosopher who enjoyed any genuine allegiance in 
Europe before the fifteenth century. On foundations, which the 
Latinized Aristotle had laid, the Roman Church indeed built up its 
intricate scheme of scholasticism. Direct study of the work of 
Plato and of the Neo-Platonists, his late Greek disciples, was an 
innovation of the Renaissance. At Florence, in the villa of the 
Medici, the old Athenian Academy was revived in the fifteenth 
century for the discussion of Plato's conception of life and love 
and art. Under the banner of Florence the sway of medievalism 
received its first challenge. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 7 

At the outset the true issues of the strife were obscured. The 
Platonists of fifteenth-century Florence were slow to recognize 
the revolution which they were putting in train. Plato's predilec- 
tion for abstractions and for allegory was not out of harmony 
with the intellectual tendencies of the INIiddle Ages, and mediaeval 
processes of thought were very gradually abandoned by the 
Florentine academicians. The new literature and speculation 
abundantly illustrate the tenacity of the x)ld spirit. The Floren- 
tine Platonists thought to reconcile the new enlightenment with 
the old scholasticism, and their jumbling of incompatible ideas 
drawn respectively from paganism and Christianity hindered for 
a generation a clear outlook. A wild incongruity infected Floren- 
tine art as well as Florentine speculation. Even Michael Angelo 
brought on canvas into the presence of the Madonna fauns dis- 
porting themselves in Dionysiac revels. Yet in time the Platonic 
light pierced the haze. At any rate the earth ceased to connote 
for the Italian Platonists gloom and misery ; the human body was 
no longer a synonym for corruption ; the reason grew impatient of 
servitude to any preconceived theory. 

It was the idealization and worship of beauty that lit, in the 
groves of the Florentine academy, the flame which at length dis- 
pelled the mediaeval vapour. The identification by the thinkers — 
first of Florence, then of other Italian cities, and afterwards of all 
the Western continent — of the highest good with beauty, the 
assumption that a true appreciation of beauty was the least dis- 
putable of virtues, went near shattering the dominant medieval 
conceptions of the world and of humanity. The doctrine which 
found exponents through the length and breadth of Italy soon 
had its apostle in the papal curia itself. Cardinal Bembo summed 
up the new gospel by declaring that only when one said of the 
world that it is ' beautiful ' did one serve the cause of truth. 
* Beautiful ' was, the cardinal argued, the only epithet which accu- 
rately described the heaven or the earth, the sea or the rivers, trees, 
gardens, or cities. 

One of the practical fruits of the new Italian conception of 
beauty merits a special emphasis. Italian painting is one of the 
insistent facts in the history of the Renaissance. Italian painting 
is the first satisfying realization in the human economy of the 
significance of colour. The Italian painters of the Renaissance first 
interpreted life with any approach to perfection in terms of colour. 
The moving cause lay in Italy's new search in the creation for 
beauty. The Italian painters were fortunately placed. A relevant 



8 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

inspiration lay in the blue of the Italian sea and of the Italian 
sky, in the mingled hues of the native marble, in the gay plumage 
of the birds, in the immense variety of iridescent flowers, in the 
fruit of the vines, in the trees of the olive and the orange and the 
palm, and, last but not least, in the brilliant tints of Italian 
women's hair and complexion. Beauty of form was fully realized 
by the Greeks ; but the Italian sense of colour was denied them. 
A full appreciation of colour in all the richness of its range is 
to be reckoned among the innovations of the Italian Renaissance. 
It is an original gift to the world of Titian and Tintoretto and 
other great painters of Italy to which poetry as w^ell as art lay 
under obligation. 

The new conception of beauty which challenged the old ideals 
of asceticism greatly stimulated the new conception of man's intel- 
lectual faculty which dealt a heavy although by no means a fatal 
blow at the mediaeval principle of dogma. The creed of the Renais- 
sance frankly acknowledged the earthly elements, the animal senses, 
in man's being. The fleshly instincts were often allowed freer play 
than before. Yet without pause did the missionaries of the Renais- 
sance urge that man differed from all terrestrial creatures by virtue 
of his endowment of reason and that that endowment was capable 
of lifting him high above the animals, and of setting him ulti- 
mately on a level with the angels. The final purpose of reason 
harmonized in the creed of the Renaissance philosophy with the 
new faith in beauty. The mind of man was destined to discover 
and reveal the ultimate beauty and order which lay behind the 
outer shapes of matter. 

Pico della Mirandola, a Renaissance philosopher, seems first to 
have invented for himself the proud title of ' interpreter of nature.* 
The title suggests the comprehensive potentiality which was 
attached to man's intellectual faculty. There were more avenues 
than one by which he might arrive at an interpretation of nature. 
A wide choice was offered him. Poetry, art, and philosophy, might 
each prove a pathway, and there was a fourth road which gave 
equal promise of the desired goal. The fourth approach lay 
through scientific inquiry. The intellectual restlessness of the 
Renaissance was impatient of specialization, and many Italian 
sons of the movement trod all the ways which seemed to incline 
in the right direction. Leonardo da Vinci is the most familiar 
type of the intellectual versatility of the era ; he sought with 
almost equal enthusiasm to conquer the domains of science as well 
as of poetry and art. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 9 

Scientific curiosity issued from the new sense of beauty and 
the new plea for intellectual enfranchisement, in as compelling 
a flow as the artistic or literary achievement of the Renaissance. 
Nowhere in sixteenth-century Europe was scientific exertion more 
active or more fruitful than in Italy. The year that witnessed 
the birth of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon witnessed the birth 
in Pisa of Galileo, the greatest Italian man of science in a line 
of succession which was already long and distinguished. 

No reference however cursory to the scientific activity of the 
Renaissance would be complete without passing mention of its chief 
practical outcome in the era, the discovery of the New World. 
The first voyages across the Atlantic, which resulted in the 
momentous discovery of the Western hemisphere, were undertaken 
by way of testing a scientific theory or guess which was pro- 
pounded in Italy in the early years of the Renaissance. The first 
two navigators who touched American shores — Columbus in the 
south and Cabot in the north — although they served foreign 
masters on their Atlantic explorations, were both natives of the 
great Italian seaport of Genoa. The intellectual stir, which came 
of the discovery of an old civilization (that of Greece) and put 
a new valuation on nature and man's intellectual capacity, was 
reinforced at no distant interval by the discovery of a new world 
which gave a new estimate of man's physical environment. The 
dark curtains which had hitherto restricted man's view of the 
physical world to a small corner of it were torn asunder, and 
the stimulating fact came to light that that which had hitherto 
been regarded by men as the whole sphere of physical life and 
nature was in reality a mere fragment of a mighty expanse, of 
the greater part of which there had been no previous knowledge. 
The intellectual revelation came first. The physical revelation 
followed. It was not a wholly accidental conjuncture of events. 
The new intellectual curiosity was first conspicuously justifying 
itself. Each revelation powerfully reacted on the other, and 
increased the fertility of Renaissance thought and action. 

An English critic has written : 

' Producers of great literature do not live in isolation, but catch 
light and heat from each other's thought. A people without in- 
tellectual commerce with other peoples has never done anything 
conspicuous in literature.' 

The Greek influences of the Italian Renaissance adequately 
establish the pronouncement as far as Italy of that era is con- 



10 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

cerned. What Greece did for Renaissance Italy, Renaissance Italy 
did for contemporary Europe. The Italian influences of the 
Renaissance moved in the sixteenth century the imagination of 
her neighbours, France and Spain. Germany and England owed 
great part of their literary and artistic aspiration in the six- 
teenth century to intellectual commerce with Italy. In England, 
France, and Spain great heights of literary endeavour were in due 
time scaled. There was no complete reciprocity with Italy in the 
exchange of literary or artistic stimulus. The star of Italian 
influence was in the ascendant throughout the epoch, and while 
she shared her radiance with the other countries of Western Europe, 
she received for a long time little compared with what she gave. 
Yet Italy was not inattentive to contemporary advances of culture 
outside her own boundaries in the sixteenth century, especially 
in the way of scientific speculation. Ideas enjoyed a freedom of 
intercourse which surmounted all the practical obstacles. In none 
of the intellectual and artistic fields did nationality prove a bar to 
communication. In the result Western Europe of the sixteenth 
century formed something like a single federation of thought and 
art, a fact which Bacon recognized when he left by will his name 
and memory to foreign nations. Voltaire subsequently wrote to 
an English friend : ' Ceux qui aiment les arts sont tous concito^'ens. 
Les honnetes gens qui pensent ont a peu pres les memes principes, 
et ne composent qu'une seule et meme republique.' Voltaire's 
vision was amply realized in the days when Shakespeare was setting 
out on his mighty career. 

II 

The term ' humanist,' when it was first invented in Italy, merely 
denoted a student of human or secular literature as distinguished 
from sacred learning or theology. The first ' humanist ' was above 
all things a classical scholar, and ' humanism ' was little more than 
a synonym for classical scholarship. But classical study, as we 
have seen, sharpened and widened all human faculty, and the word 
' humanist ' may be justly extended to apply to all who in the 
sixteenth century were inspired by the new faith in beauty and 
reason, to all who sought to realize the new exalted hopes of human 
progress. 

England was somewhat slow to enlist in this mighty march of 
mind. The culture of the Renaissance blossomed late in the British 
isle, far later than in Italy, or indeed in France. Nor did the Eng- 
lish soil prove equal to fostering the humanist development in all 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 11 

the fields of endeavour which the new spirit fructified in Italy. No 
original painting, no original music, were cradled in Tudor Eng- 
land. There the Renaissance sought distinctive expression in 
literature and poetry alone. Nor was it till the last years of 
the sixteenth century that the literature or the poetry of Tudor 
England acquired true distinction. But although her pace was 
sluggish through the earlier decades, England was steadily gar- 
nering, as they passed, foreign stimulus, chiefly Italian stimulus. 
Not all the foreign impetus was the exclusive gift of Italy. On 
the one hand. Englishmen came to study the classics for themselves, 
and, on the other, they soon had at their disposal the Renaissance 
literature of France. Yet French literature of the sixteenth cen- 
tury was itself to a large degree fruit of the Italian tree. Much 
of the spirited teaching which France offered her neighbour had 
been learnt in Italian schools. The French liberality of suggestion 
helped to reinforce in literary England Italian influence. But the 
foreign influences, whencesoever they came, worked eflSciently. 
They braced the native genius to triumphant exertion which left 
Elizabethan literature a match for the world. 

Humanism in England may be dated from the visit of the three 
Oxford scholars, Linacre, Grocyn, and Colet, to Florence and other 
cities of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. Colet's friend, 
Sir Thomas More, showed at the opening of the following century 
a sensitiveness to the new enlightenment which entitles him to be 
regarded as its earliest English apostle. His Utopia ranks with 
the richest fruits of the new Renaissance study of Plato; but it 
should be borne in mind that More's first publication was a transla- 
tion into English of a pregnant biography of Pico dcUa Mirandola, 
a Florentine pioneer of that interpretation of Platonic philosophy 
which was re-forming the human intellect. Sir Thomas More justly 
called Pico ' a great lord of Italy and an excellent cunning man 
in all sciences.' 

Englishmen acquired early that habit of Italian travel which 
they have not yet lost. English visitors to the great Italian cities 
always made careful report at home of the new revelations of 
Italian thought. In the middle years of the century one Sir 
Edward Hoby visited Venice, then in all her splendour, as well 
as Padua and Mantua, Ferrara, Siena, and Rome. It was Hoby 
who rendered into English the very textbook of the Renaissance 
culture of Italy, II Cortegiano (' The Courtier ') by Baldassare 
Castiglione. That volume pictured in minutest detail the scholar 
and the gentleman as he had been fashioned by the new ideals, and 



12 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

the theme was rounded off by a rapturous oration assigned to 
Cardinal Bembo on the new conceptions of beauty and of love. 

English travellers in sixteenth-century Italy, despite political 
and religious controversy, were hospitably entertained. They were 
impressed not merely by the country's intellectual and artistic 
triumphs, but by the refined amenities of her social life. Academies 
on the Florentine model had made the literary club for conversation 
and discussion a prominent feature of civic organization. Art had 
touched the domestic furniture and equipment, and had brought 
into use devices and implements which were barely known in Eng- 
land. Many an English visitor to Italy was surprised to find forks 
habitually taking the place of fingers. Throughout Shakespeare's 
lifetime Englishmen explored Italy in numbers which increased 
year by year. There were protests from time to time on grounds 
of morality or religion. Rome, it was urged, was no fit place of 
pilgrimage for an English Protestant. The practical ethics of 
the Itahan people were held to falsify conspicuously the lofty 
standards of their ideal philosophy. Some stern English moralists 
judged that the opportunity of vicious indulgence, the notorious 
enchantments of Italian Circes, were the main incentives to Italian 
travel. Englishmen in Italy were reckoned indeed by some to 
better the Italian instruction in sin, so that men occasionally 
spoke of an Italianate Englishman as a devil incarnate. The 
Italian Renaissance, despite its high ideals and brilliant accom- 
plishments, had a dark side which insular prejudice or intolerance 
was not likely to underestimate. Yet it was a negligible minority 
of Englishmen in Italy who suffered serious moral or religious 
deterioration. The most efficient leaders of public opinion never 
ceased to preach the value of travel as a necessary part of a good 
education, and it was to foreign Italian cities, with their memo- 
rable antiquities, libraries, colleges, theatres, and academies, that 
the young Englishmen were chiefly advised to bend their steps. 
If they were confronted by temptation there was benefit in the 
discipline of resistance. ' Homekeeping youth have ever homely 
wits,' wrote Shakespeare. A perfect man, he added, was one who 
was tried and tutored in the world outside his native country. The 
dramatist laughingly detected in the travelled Englishman no worse 
failing than a predilection for outlandish manners and dress which 
offended insular taste. When it was said of an Elizabethan that 
he ' had swum in a gondola,' the intention was to pay him a com- 
pliment on his polished deportment — on his urbanity, a trait which 
was first identified with Italian cities. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 13 

Sir Philip Sidney was perliaps more sensitive to the varied mani- 
festations of the spirit of the age than any contemporary, and in 
his short Hfe he illustrated by his own activities as graphically as 
any Englishman the versatility of the new forces of culture. His 
visit in youth to the home of the Renaissance, to Italy — while all 
the artistic, literarjs and scientific impulses of the era were in full 
glow — attests the stimulating purpose which Italian travel com- 
monly served. In Italy Sidney learned sonnetteering of the 
school of Petrarch. The pastoral romanticism which the Nea- 
politan Sanazzaro had brought to birth in his Italian Arcadia im- 
pelled Sidney to furnish his fellow countrymen with an English 
Arcadia — a region which it would rather puzzle serious geogra- 
phers to find on the map. Sanazzaro first applied the geographical 
Greek name of Arcadia to an imaginary realm of pastoral sim- 
plicity, where love-making was the sole concern of life. It was 
largely, too, under the sway of Italian criticism that Sidney sought 
in his Apology for Poetry to shame the earth-creeping mind ' into 
lifting itself up to look into the sky of poetry.' But Sidney's 
craving for knowledge under Italian skies passed beyond these 
bounds. He did not limit his observation to literature in his 
Italian tour. At Venice, where he remained longest, he devoted a 
great part of his time to astronomy and music, a science and an 
art which absorbed immense Italian energy despite other distrac- 
tion. Furthermore Sidney enjoys the rare distinction among 
Elizabethans of coming into personal contact with the two great 
Italian painters, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. With those men 
the pictorial art of Venice came near perfection. Each offered to 
paint Sidney's portrait, and he was embarrassed by the choice. 
Whether he was wise in selecting Paolo Veronese I leave to the 
judgment of those who know more of art than I do. The portrait 
was completed by Veronese, and all lament that it is not known 
to survive. 

Yet it was not essential for an Englishman of Shakespeare's era 
to visit Italy in order to keep in touch with her literary activi- 
ties or philosophic progress. There were from time to time Italian 
visitors to England, who were capable of giving to Englishmen 
in their own country instruction in the new Italian culture by word 
of mouth. An Italian professor of law, Alberico Gentili, an Italian 
jurist of the highest reputation in his own countr}^ taught Roman 
law for many years at Oxford, and gave a new impulse to its study 
in England. But the most notable of the Italian visitors to this 
country while Shakespeare was a youth was the Platonic philoso- 



14 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

pher, Giordano Bruno, whom Coleridge classes with Dante and 
Ariosto as one of the three most characteristic Italians of all 
time. Bruno was a philosopher and a scientific inquirer of the 
tj'pe dear to the Renaissance. He sought out the beauty of the 
world and discovered it in a light flowing from heaven. He 
defended the new Copernican system of astronomy which makes 
the earth a satellite of the sun. In a mystical allegory, Spaccio 
de la Bestia Trionfante, he foretold how the elements of man's, 
lower nature were to vanish, and their places to be filled by truth, 
prudence, and wisdom — wisdom whose daughter is law. In his 
Gli Eroici Furori Bruno distinguished two kinds of enthusiasm, 
one which bred blind and unreasoning fanaticism, and the other 
which bred that love of truth and justice which turns some men 
into prophets and teachers and other men into creative artists. 
This noble prophet of enlightenment, who delivered his message 
to the chief universities of Europe in turn, arrived in England in 
1583 and stayed here nearly two years. A warm welcome was 
accorded him by Sir Philip Sidney and his friends, and in many 
a debate on mighty themes did he engage them under their own 
roofs. Not all England was prepared to accept his ethereal teach- 
ing. He obtained permission of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford 
to lecture in that University, and announced himself as ' the awak- 
ener of sleeping souls' (' dormitantium animarum excubitor'), 
but his audience disappointed him by their somnolence. He con- 
soled himself by bitterly describing Oxford as ' una costellazione 
di pedantesca ostinatissima ignoranza e presunzione mista con 
una rustica incivilta, che farebbe prevaricar la pazienza di Giobbe.' 
Nor could he refrain from complaints of the bad manners of the 
English people, their uncouth language, and their detestable 
climate. Yet whatever the discouragements of academic Oxford 
and the discomforts of his English sojourn, Bruno, while he lived 
in stimulating converse with men of letters in London, wrote or 
planned the philosophic and scientific books on which his fame 
mainly rests. The dedication of two of these works — Spaccio de la 
Bestia Trionfante and Gli Eroici Furori — to Sir Philip Sidney is 
a tribute to a fellow countryman in which we may all take pride. 
Elizabethan England at large may hardly have been ready for 
Bruno's gospel ; but she at any rate placed no restriction on his 
freedom of thought. He enjoyed here, in his own phrase, an 
inestimable ' libertas philosophandi.' In his own country the forces 
of dogma had been checked but not crushed, and scientific origi- 
nality was a chief abhorrence of the conservative temper. Bruno's 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 15 

boldness of utterance finally exposed hini to the cruel reproof 
of the Inquisition, that blind protector of the ancient creeds. In 
the last year of the sixteenth century Bruno was burnt at the 
stake in Rome. He cheerfully sacrificed life in the cause of knowl- 
edge. It is some satisfaction to know that since 1889 there has 
stood a statue of this Italian guest and friend of Sir Philip Sidney 
in Rome itself, on the very spot — the Campo di Fior(^ — where the 
faggots once blazed about his helpless frame. 

But beyond the visit of Englishmen to Italy or of Italians to 
England, there lay a far vaster opportunity of acquiring in Eng- 
land a knowledge of Italian poetry and philosophy. At the mo- 
ment that Shakespeare was absorbed in the great work of his 
life, the domestic facilities may be gauged by the issue in English 
renderings of the two most imposing manifestations of the Italian 
poetic genius of the era. The most characteristic verse of 
sixteenth-century Italy was the epic poetry of Ariosto and Tasso. 
Each poet's temperament illustrates to perfection a salient phase 
of the Italian genius of the Renaissance, and together they present 
its whole range. Both tell a story with spirit ; both are masters 
of verbal melody ; both have the painter's eye for imagery. But 
the boundless energy and kindly irony of Ariosto are replaced in 
^asso by romantic pathos and deep-toned lyric harmony. To both 
their idiosyncrasies Elizabethan translators were found capable of 
doing justice. The greatest English epic of the period, Spenser's 
Faerie Queene, owes much to the inspiration of these Italian poets. 
Spenser avowedly set himself to ' overgo ' or excel Ariosto, and an 
admission of his success is quite consistent with a liberal appre- 
ciation of the many stirring episodes and fancies which he bor- 
rowed from Ariosto's pages. The most exquisite canto which 
Spenser penned, the sixth of the second book, is touched in nearly 
every line by Tasso's sensuous enchantment. 

Time will not permit of more than a hint of the Italian influ- 
ences which worked immediately on Elizabethan l3'ric or sonnet. 
' The sweet Tuscan,' as Petrarch was called by Elizabethan poets, 
was the confessed master of the Elizabethan sonnet. Spenser was 
reckoned by Elizabethan critics so expert a pupil that he was 
often called ' the English Petrarch.' Spenser's lyric fancy was 
steeped moreover in the philosophy of the Florentine Platonists, 
while Tasso was one of a hundred other Italian poets who trained 
the lyric inspiration of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Samuel 
Daniel's lyric charm is not in question. Yet it is doubtful if with- 
out the tuition of Tasso and some other foreign masters (French 



16 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

as well as Italian), he would have won his high place in our 
literature. Here are some beautiful lines from his pen : 

Let's love, the sun doth set and rise again ; 

But when as our short light 
Comes once to set, it makes eternal night. 

Although Daniel gave no hint that he owed the verse to any out- 
side suggestion, he was translating, as literally as the two languages 
admitted, the pensive words of Tasso: 

Amiam, che '1 Sol si muove, e poi rinasce. 

A noi sua breve luce 
S' asconde, e '1 sonno eterna notte adduce. 

If we pass to prose, especially to prose on speculative topics, 
we find the processes of assimilation, translation, or adaptation 
from the Italian at work with equal vigour. When Bacon declares 
his hostility to Aristotle, and insists on the superiority of experi- 
ment and induction over deduction or ratiocination untested by 
direct observation, he admits indebtedness to a philosopher who 
lately lived and wrote in the extreme south of Italy, to Telesio of 
Cosenza. Bacon curiously calls Telesio an Italian ' novelist,' 
meaning an Italian innovator of scientific method. When Bacon 
dubbed himself an ' interpreter of nature,' he borrowed the title 
from the Florentine Platonist, Pico della Mirandola. As in poetry, 
so in science, Italian hints often blossomed in English minds into 
imagination or thought of unexpected power and scope. William 
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, graduated 
in 1602 in the medical school of Padua University, after attending 
the lectures of the Italian professor who was the greatest anato- 
mist of his day. The help of his great Italian teacher is not to 
be gainsaid. Yet Harvey passed far beyond the range of his 
Italian study when he gave medical and physiological knowledge a 
new certitude. 

Ill 

I claim Shakespeare as the greatest of humanists in the broad 
sense which the term justly bears in the history of the Italian 
Renaissance. I believe that in Shakespeare the spirit of humanism 
worked to supreme effect. Were I casting a discourse on humanism 
in the mould of a sermon and prefacing it with texts, I doubt if 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IT 

I could do better than choose two passages from Shakespeare. 
There are two familiar passages in the play of Hamlet each of 
which expresses with admirable point one or other of the two most 
significant phases of the Renaissance — the cry for intellectual 
enfranchisement on the one hand and the enthusiasm for man's 
physical and mental endowments on the other. The first passage 
runs : 

Sure He that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
The capability and god-like reason, 
To fust in us unused. 

The second runs : 

' What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! how 
infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express and admirable ! 
in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the 
beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! ' 

It would be easy to match the first passage in the writings of 
Giordano Bruno. The second passage seems to echo the raptures 
of Pico della Mirandola. Elsewhere Shakespeare makes himself 
responsible for yet another opinion which precisely reflected the 
intellectual tendency of the era. From his pen came the words : 
' Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.' Many times too 
does the dramatist reinforce Hamlet's salutation of the potential 
beauty of human nature by enthusiastic greetings of the beauties 
of physical nature in which the new Italian sense of colour seems 
to be craving an original utterance. When Shakespeare wrote. 

Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, 
Kissing with golden face the meadows green. 
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy, 

or when he hailed 

daffodils. 
That come before the swallow dares, and take [i.e. bewitch] 
The winds of March with beauty. 



18 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

he testified to the same impulse which moved Cardinal Bembo, 
a generation before, to say that beauty is the essential attribute of 
the heavens and the earth, of rivers and gardens. Shakespeare's 
definition of man as ' the heauty of the world,' and the power which 
he detects in the daffodils of infatuating with their ' beauty ' the 
March winds, powerfully accentuate the Renaissance apostle's 
teaching. Everj^ reader of Shakespeare will be able to add to these 
quotations, which interpret with all Shakespeare's gift of lan- 
guage paramount principles of the Italian Renaissance. 

Intellectual receptivity, assimilative capacity, is an invariable 
mark of poetic genius. The popular apophthegm that the poet is 
born and not made needs much qualification before it can be credited 
with truth. The originality of genius is no mere spontaneous 
emanation or exhalation of the poet's mind. It is rather the 
magical power of absorbing very rapidly, even instantaneously, 
pre-existing thought and fancy, and of delivering them to the world 
again in a new and arresting shape or expression. Shakespeare's 
pre-eminence resides in his catholic sensitiveness to external im- 
pressions, whether they came from reading or from observation, 
and in his power of transmuting them in the crucible of his mind 
into something richer and rarer than they were before. All modes 
of thought and style wrought thus upon him. Among the many 
foreign influences to which he proved susceptible, I believe the 
teaching of the Renaissance looms as large as any in a just esti- 
mate of the sources of his achievement. 

The needful recognition of tlie foreign element in the constitution 
of Shakespeare's achievement is quite compatible with the fullest 
acknowledgement of his patriotic sentiment which is clearly unas- 
sailable. While he must be absolved of all taint of insularity he 
cannot be suspected of cosmopolitanism in its undesirable signifi- 
cance. The bracing air of toleration fed his spirit ; but that 
virtuous sustenance never impaired his love of his own country 
or his confident faith in her destiny. It was he who apostro- 
phized his country and countrymen in his own magnificent dic- 
tion as : 

This happy breed of men, this little world ; 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

Which serves it in the office of a wall, 

Or as a moat defensive to a house 

Against the envy of less happier lands : 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 19 

At the same time Shakespeare, with ahnost equal fervour, depre- 
cates the shortness of vision which ignores the patriotism of other 
countries, and refuses all fellow-feeling; with them : 

Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night, 
Are they not but in Britain? . . . Prithee think 
There's livers out of Britain. 

Shakespeare is at once the noblest expositor of patriotism, and the 
most resolute contemner of insularity. 

No one who has closely studied Shakespeare's writings can har- 
bour any doubt of the breadth of his reading, or can view with 
other than impatience the persistent fallacy, which Milton rashly 
stamped with his authority, when he wrote of Shakespeare as 
* fancy's child warbling his native woodnotes wild.' The extent 
to which Shakespeare studied Italian literature in the original 
admits of discussion. He quotes in Italian a proverbial compli- 
ment on the beauties of Venice in his earliest play, Love's Labour's 
Lost : 

Venetia, Venetia, 
Chi non ti vede, non ti pretia. 

Hamlet, when he talks to Ophelia of ' the players' ' play, remarks 
that ' the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian.' 
There is clear evidence too in the history of the composition of 
Othello that the dramatist had access to at least one tale which 
had never worn any but an Italian garb. But the range of his 
linguistic power does not matter very much. He was in any case 
far better versed in English than in any other tongue. A large 
part of Italian poetry and prose of the Renaissance was accessible 
to him in English translation. As students of Spenser know, 
the fundamental ideas of the Renaissance and many literary 
processes of the Renaissance — the Platonic interpretation of life 
and the world, the decorative usage of classical mythology — were 
already woven into the web of Elizabethan writing when Shake- 
speare was serving his apprenticeship to his art. There were 
many keys to open the gates of knowledge to a man of his alert 
intuition. 

To a large extent the Italian affinities of Shakespeare's work 
were in all probability a vicarious endowment, but they were none 
the less effective on that account. The Elizabethan atmosphere 



20 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

was so charged with Italian thought and fancy, that no sensitive 
poetic genius, even if Itahan books were wholly sealed for him, 
could well escape an ample draught of inspiration. In the familiar 
scene in The Merchant of Venice, where Lorenzo talks through the 
moon-lit night with Jessica in the gardens of Portia's villa, one 
hears throughout the dominant notes of the Italian Renaissance in 
all their sweetness. The setting of the scene catches completely 
the Italian spirit. The mythological reminiscences, the praise of 
music, the neo-Platonic and pseudo-scientific theory of the spheres, 
are all Italian or Greco-Italian echoes. 

When Lorenzo points out to Jessica the floor of heaven, and 
tells her 

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 

But in his motion like an angel sings. 

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins : 

the scholarly reader may be forgiven for recalling the mystical 
speculation of a famous South Italian contemporary, Tommaso 
Campanella, poet and man of science, who out of a Platonic fancy 
elaborated a beatific vision of spirit-inhabitants of the stars, 
communicating thought to one another in words of light. But I 
think we should be content to ascribe this and other surprising 
likenesses of thought and fancy between Shakespeare's poetry and 
Italian Renaissance speculation to agencies other than immediate 
recourse to Italian texts. 

Shakespeare's specific references to Italian art are rare. They 
do scant justice to the scope of the Italian triumphs in the realms 
of painting or of sculpture. Yet Shakespeare on occasion makes 
vague reference to art at large which supplements the story of his 
intuitive relations with the doctrines of the Italian Renaissance. 
Once, and once only, Shakespeare paid an enthusiastic tribute to 
the life-like excellence of Italian sculpture. But his praises seem 
to lack the precision which betokens first-hand knowledge. In 
The Winter's Tale (v. ii. 93-9), the supposed statue of Hermione 
is described as ' a piece many years in doing and now newly per- 
formed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he 
himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile 
Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.* The speaker 
finally asserts that Romano ' so near to Hermione hath done 
Hermione, that they say one would speak to her and stand in 
hope of answer.' Shakespeare's ' rare Italian master ' was an 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 21 

eminent pupil of Raphael. Vasari, the sixteenth-century biog- 
rapher of Italian artists, cites an epitaph which imputes to him 
skill as a sculptor, no less than as a painter; but it is by his 
pictures alone that Romano is now known, and Shakespeare's 
panegyric cannot be literally corroborated. Nowhere else does 
the dramatist make a like categorical reference to an Italian artist 
of the Renaissance. More than once elsewhere, however, he grows 
almost ecstatic over the living illusion of great portraiture. He 
fails to associate the perfect art directly with Italy. Of the por- 
trait of Timon of Athens by a painter who is nominally an 
Athenian, a critic who is also presented as an Athenian, exclaims 
(Timon, i. i. 40-1) : 

It tutors Nature : artificial strife 

Lives in these touches, livelier than life.^ 

Whatever the limitations of Shakespeare's personal acquaintance 
with the artistic fruits of sixteenth-century Italy, he clearly assimi- 
lated a popular philosophic axiom of Italian criticism which repre- 
sented the great sculptor or painter as a rival of creative Nature, 
and Nature herself as cherisher of a fear that the artist by improv- 
ing on her handiwork might discredit her. Bembo, the Cardinal 
of the Renaissance, invested the theory with extravagance when 
he wrote on Raphael's tomb : 

Hie ille est Raphael, metuit quo sospite vinci 
Rerum magna parens, et moriente, mori, 

(Here lies the famous Raphael, in whose life-time great mother 
Nature feared to be outdone, and at whose death feared to die.) 

It is curious to note that the identical conceit was chosen to 
decorate Shakespeare's own epitaph in Stratford-on-Avon Church. 
The elegist, when he wrote of — 

Shakespeare, with whom 
Quick nature died, 

placed the dramatist in that category of creative artists, to which 
Bembo had assigned Raphael. Shakespeare's poetic art was thus 

'Cf. Venus and Adonis (289-92) : 

Look when a painter would surpass the life, 
In limning out a well proportion'd steed, 
His art with nature's workmanship at strife. 
As if the dead the living should exceed. 



22 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

identified by his own countrymen Avith the same conception of 
creative genius as that called into being by the pictorial art of 
the Italian Renaissance. 

I have spoken of some ancillary glories of Shakespeare's dra- 
matic poetry, and of the exalted conception of his artistic powers, 
which justly identified him with the sons of the Italian Renaissance. 
When we descend to the more material foundations of his work, the 
problem enters a somewhat different phase. It is familiar knowl- 
edge that Shakespeare hewed many of his plays out of Italian 
stories. The most superficial studies of his plots show him to be 
beyond doubt a close student of a very distinctive species of 
literature which is peculiarly characteristic of Renaissance Italy. 
Boccaccio, of Florence, the herald of the new Italian movement 
in many of its directions, may be reckoned to have rendered his 
most conspicuous service to the amenities of civilization by his 
creation of the art of the short story. In musical language which 
eliminated once and for all the crudities of the old Tuscan dialect, 
Boccaccio pictured, with a softly glowing serenity, experiences 
of love and life of which he had read or heard or seen. He treats 
human nature with a frankness which often shocks the prudish. He 
is prone to dwell with a cheerful irony on the infidelities of hus- 
bands and wives. Yet he is a master of pathos as well as of gaiety, 
and blends varied ingredients harmoniously. Boccaccio the novelist 
founded in Italy a long-lived school, and though none of his 
scholars equalled his own powers, many who were especially active 
in the sixteenth century, caught some touch of his vivacity. 
Bandello, a Lombard, who was a bishop in the south of France 
at the time of Shakespeare's birth, turned into lively fiction of 
Boccaccio's type episodes in the social life of his day. Although 
he lacked his master's gift of style Bandello excelled Boccaccio in 
lubricity. A third sixteenth-century Italian novelist, Giraldi 
Cinthio, of the cultured city of Ferrara, also enjoyed a wide 
reputation in his day. In his methods, merits, and demerits he 
may be linked with Bandello. The Italian novel, indeed, engaged 
almost as much energy in Renaissance Italy as the drama subse- 
quently engaged in Elizabethan or Jacobean England. It found 
readers, not in Italy alone, but, either in the original or in transla- 
tion, in all countries of Western Europe. Imitations as well as 
translations soon abounded in France, Spain, and ultimately in 
England. 

The Italian novel rendered the English drama the practical 
service of supplying it with a treasury of plots, and Shakespeare, 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 2,^ 

like all the fellow dramatists of his time, welcomed with enthusiasm 
such practical help. Most but not all the Italian stories which 
he employed were ready to his hand in his own language or in 
French. His indebtedness to Italy is not, however, greatly re- 
duced thereby. The English and French renderings at his com- 
mand, though differing among themselves in efficiency, were usually 
literal. Their temper was little changed. In whatever shape 
Shakespeare gained access to them, the main stories of AlVs Well 
that Ends Well and Cymbeline, of which Helena and Imogen are 
the respective heroines, remain the ripe fruit of Boccaccio's in- 
vention. Bandcllo is the parent of the leading episodes of KomeQ 
and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. Cinthio was the first 
to tell the tragic adventure of Isabella in Measure for Measure 
and the tragic trials of Othello and Desdemona. Even where Shake- 
speare seeks his plot in romances of English authorship, as in 
As You Like It and The Winter's Tale, the Italian influence is 
not wholly absent ; for the English novelists commonly marched 
along the Italian road : they rarely travelled far from it. 

The Italian fable, it goes without saying, formed as a rule the 
mere basis of Shakespeare's dramatic structure. Having studied 
the Italian tale and examined its dramatic possibilities, Shake- 
speare altered and transmuted it with the utmost freedom as his 
dramatic spirit moved him. It is by his changes rather than by 
his literal transferences that the greatness of his faculty, the 
breadth of his intuitive grasp of human passion and sentiment, 
may best be gauged. 

Yet the scenes of his chief comedies and of many tragedies rarely 
leave Italy. The episodes are assigned to Venice or Verona, to 
Milan or Mantua, to Florence or Padua. He rarely takes the 
names of his characters from the Italian novels of his immediate 
study. He rechristens his dramatis personae, but the new designa- 
tions are no less Italian than the old. It is curious to observe 
that, when in As You Like It Shakespeare is dramatizing a piece 
of English fiction by his fellow countryman, Thomas Lodge, he 
rejects Lodge's amorphous name of Rosader for his hero and sub- 
stitutes a name so rooted in the traditions of Italian literature 
as Orlando. I think it provable that Shakespeare's Orlando, the 
hero of As You Like It, was deliberately christened after the Or- 
lando of Ariosto's great Italian epic. Shakespeare's Italian 
nomenclature may not always suggest quite so much as that ; but 
it invariably proclaims him the pupil of an Italian school, paying 
homage to his masters. 



24 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

At times Shakespeare's choice of Italian plot sets his work in 
the full tide of the Italian literary stream. The story of Romeo 
and Juliet, which Bandello first told to Europe, was made familiar 
to Italy by earlier pens. The tale, which has a right to be reck- 
oned a national legend of Italy, was the theme of Shakespeare's 
earliest venture in tragedy of the great romantic kind. In his 
dramatic treatment of it, he gave indubitable promise of his glori- 
ous fertility and power. Manifold are the original touches of 
poetry, insight, and humour in Shakespeare's version of the Italian 
novel. Yet who can deny the Italian glow which lives in Shake- 
speare's radiant picture of youthful love.^* 

The play of Twelfth Night is cast in a very different mould 
from that of Romeo and Juliet. Everybody knows the main plot, 
how a girl is disguised as a page ; and how, while her master moves 
her love, she is sent by him to plead his suit with a proud beauty, 
who on her part is fascinated by the supposed boy. The fable 
is a fantasy of which all the elements are dyed in Italian colours. 
Bandello, although he gave the story its European vogue, was, as 
in the case of Romeo and Juliet, but one of its Italian narrators. 
No English alchemy could free the sensitive and intricate amours of 
their Italian note. Shakespeare's play, in spite of his manipulation 
of the Italian plot and his fusion with it of much original comic 
episode, echoes the strains which Boccaccio's youths and maidens 
voiced in the garden overlooking Florence at the dawn of the 
Italian Renaissance. What atmosphere save that of sensuous 
Florence does Duke Orsino breathe when in the first speech of the 
play he makes languorous appeal to the musicians : 

That strain again ! it had a dying fall : 
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound 
That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
Stealing and giving odour. 

Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello, the best constructed of all his 
tragic dramas, presents life in its sternest aspect and passion in its 
fiercest guise. Yet it is based as directly as Romeo and Juliet and 
Twelfth Night on Italian foundations, and, unlike the other Italian 
stories whence Shakespeare drew his plots, the fable of Othello 
is not known to have circulated out of Italy, or rather out of the 
Italian language, before Shakespeare handled it. The author of the 
story of Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello is the sixteenth-century 
novelist, Cinthio of Ferrara. Some of his tales had. been rendered 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 25 

into French, and at least one into English. Before Shakespeare 
wrote Othello he had himself made a first draft on Cinthio's store 
of fiction. The plot of Measure for Measure was of Cinthio's 
devising ; but that painful Italian story was ready to Shakespeare's 
hand in an English version. Not so the little novel of the Moor 
of Venice. In the Italian alone was that tragic history to be 
studied. In adapting the incidents to his purpose, Shakespeare 
here if anywhere exerted all his powers. With magical subtlety 
he invests the character of Othello with passionate intensity, of 
which the Italian novelist knew little. lago is transformed by 
the English dramatist from the conventional Italian criminal 
of Cinthio's page into the profoundest of all portraits of hypocrisy 
and intellectual villany. At every point Shakespeare has lifted the 
theme high above the melodramatic level on which the Italian had 
left it. New subsidiary characters are added. The catastrophe is 
wholly reconstructed. The master spirit is everywhere at work 
with magnificent energy. Yet Cinthio's guidance is not to be dis- 
paraged. His story holds the sparks which Shakespeare's genius 
fanned into brilliant flame. 

Finally, let me supplement what I have already said of the tinges 
of Platonic philosophy, which the Italian Renaissance conveyed to 
Shakespeare's pages, by a concluding reference to his Sonnets. 
It would be irrelevant to my present purpose to mention, let alone 
discuss, any of the difficult problems which attach to these poems. 
At the moment I merely cite them as consummating evidence of the 
genuine strength of Shakespeare's affinities with Italian Platonism. 
Responsive as he proves himself elsewhere to varied influences of 
the Renaissance, I believe that the Sonnets prove even more con- 
vincingly than any other of his writings how deeply he had drunk 
of the spring of Italian philosophy. All the sonnetteers of Europe, 
from their father Petrarch downwards, enlisted under Plato's 
banner and preached the ideality of beauty, isolating it from its 
physical embodiment. As Platonic or Neo-Platonic study widened 
in Italy, much lyric poetry there and elsewhere assimilated in 
greater and greater degree the technicalities of Plato's or the 
Neo-Platonists' mystical conception. Michael Angelo, one of the 
noblest Italian champions of the Renaissance, wrote sonnets, in 
which the loveliness of earthly things is invariably held to reflect 
an ethereal light from heaven. Shakespeare immersed himself as 
a sonnetteer in even deeper metaphysical subtleties. Constantly 
he credits the beauty of the friend whom he celebrates with the 
qualities of a ' shadow ' — the English rendering of the technical 



26 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1915 

Latin word umbra which Giordano Bruno and other Italian 
Platonists applied to the mundane reflection of their idea or ideal 
of perfection — an idea or ideal which lay outside the material 
world. The beauty of Shakespeare's friend is (he tells us) a 
* shadow ' of the true ' substance ' of perfect beauty ; the substance 
is not visible to mortal eye, only the shadow is seen on earth. 
Shakespeare goes even a step further in his metaphysical theoriz- 
ing in the Sonnets. Beauty in its unearthly perfection he identifies 
with truth, again an entity which is independent of matter and 
indeed of time. Constantly Shakespeare links truth and beauty 
together, as of the same ethereal significance and quality. The 
meaning of his phraseology is, as is common in such debate, often 
obscure. But there is no reason tO doubt that one of the doctrines 
by which he stood when he penned his sonnets was an anticipation 
of Keats's mystical creed : 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

It was by way of Italy that such doctrine reached Shakespeare 
in England. 

Shakespeare's work is a vast continent, and I this afternoon am 
only endeavouring within the limits of my power and my hour to 
explore a single stretch of the territory. There are many, and my 
sympathies are with them, who detect in Shakespeare's humour his 
greatest gift. That endowment and his manner of exercising it 
owe nothing to Italy. Italian humour was pitched in another key. 
Nor can Italy claim any influence on his masterly reform of the 
methods of drama, and on his triumphant broadening of its bases. 
Italian drama of the sixteenth century was too closely wedded to 
the classical canons to touch at many points a dramatic ambition, 
which sought to realize in the theatre the highest ideals of romance, 
and to set adrift theatrical conventions in manifest conflict with 
the representation of sentient life. The brisk dialogue of Shake- 
spearean comedy and the portrayal there of some veteran types 
of eccentricity may occasionally echo an Italian note. But the 
profundities of Shakespearean tragedy lay beyond the Italian 
range. The Italian Renaissance was but one of the forces which 
went to the making of Shakespeare's mighty achievement. But 
I hope I have said enough to show that Italian thought and in- 
vention lent a well-defined sustenance to his unmatchable genius. 

Shakespeare's indebtedness to Italy has many parallels in the 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 27 

history of English poetry. Chaucer, Shakespeare's greatest poetic 
predecessor, was an admiring disciple of the work of both Dante 
and Boccaccio. Milton, Shakespeare's successor on the throne of 
English poetry, was an appreciative and a grateful student in 
many Italian poetic schools. When we leap a century and face 
the great revival, of which Byron and Shelley were two exponents, 
we meet in English poetry with a passionate devotion to Italy, 
which was accentuated by Italy's contemporary suffering and 
oppression. The Brownings bore on high the same torch until it 
reached the hand of Swinburne, who was stirred by Italy's past and 
present fortune to his noblest poetic utterances. Swinburne was 
profoundly sympathetic with Italy in her manful struggles for 
liberty and unity, and he. greeted exultingly her restoration to a 
place among the great nations. He saw in the colours of her 
flag, green and white and red, symbols of hope and light and 
life. Had he lived to be with us to-day we may say with confidence 
that he would have applied to Italy at this moment his own words 
of earlier date: 

She feels her ancient breath and the old blood 
Move in her immortal veins. 

Swinburne's poems on Italy worthily pursue a great tradition of 
English poetry. The Italian allegiance of Shakespeare, emperor 
of English poets, gives that tradition its most dazzling glory. 



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